You may not have heard of Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide Friday, but he was famous among those who campaign for online access to public information.

Aaron did a lot of important things — and other folks have already written about them (for example here, here and here) — but what you should know is that he was a successful webpreneur and geek who became an important voice fighting for your right to access public information online.

Full disclosure: While I didn’t really know him (we’re not even Facebook friends) we did work together briefly when he agreed to write a chapter in my book, Open Government.

I’m a news guy, so I won’t comment on the merits of the felony criminal prosecution of him for what has been described as an act of cyber civil disobedience. We’ve posted the court file so you can read it for yourself.

Those are records that the federal government could make freely available to the public but chooses not to. In fact, it would cost you $50.90 to download them.

You see, even though every American has a constitutional right to access the records of our courts, and the government has them online, they charge you for access unless you physically go to the court in which the case is being tried (in this case the federal courthouse in Boston).

The justification for locking those records behind a government paywall is that the $77 million in fees are needed to fund the system, called Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER).

But the money collected far exceeds to costs of running the system, and has, according to California Watch, been used as a slush fund to pay for a hodgepodge of other expenses.

Why the digression? Swartz himself downloaded and published 20 million of those court documents — documents which it is every American’s constitutional right to see. In return he was the target of an FBI investigation (that did not lead to any criminal charges).